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“What are you singing?” she asked.

He thought about it carefully, because he didn’t know how to tell her.

“I do not know yet,” he said slowly. “It is not finished.”

She rested her chin on his chest and studied his face. “When will it be finished?”

He looked down at her, at her tangled hair and her flushed cheeks and her sleepy eyes. At the small, warm weight of her lying on his heart.

“When I know how it ends,” he said.

She smiled and laid her head back down on his shoulder, and after a while her breathing slowed and softened into sleep. He held her in the warm water, with the river moving gently around them, and hummed the unfinished song over and over under his breath.

Far above them, in the stone, the drill kept pounding.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The beacon chirped, and Frankie nearly dropped it. She had been carrying it out of habit, clipped to the strap of her pack, the way she had since the first night. She had stopped looking at it days ago. Every time she checked, it had shown her the same two grey words on its cracked little screen, No signal. After that morning in the gardens she hadn’t wanted to find out how she would feel if they changed.

Now it was chirping at her. A thin, electronic sound, bright and insistent, bouncing off the walls of the passage. She fumbled it off the strap with shaking fingers and stared at the screen. The words had changed completely. There was a flickering bar in the corner, faint and uncertain, and beneath it a single word that made her heart leap. SEARCHING.

“Korrak,” she said. Her voice came out strange and high. “Korrak, it’s working.”

He turned back from the passage ahead, where he had been leading her upstream towards the falls. He looked at the beacon in her hand and then at her face, and he didn’t say anything. But he came back and stood beside her, close enough that his arm brushed hers.

They had set out the morning after he told her about the drilling, and he had carried her over the worst of the climbs. She had wanted to go and see for herself. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping for. Maybe some proof that it was real, that there were people up there digging for her, and that the entire world hadn’t forgotten she existed. He had taken her hand without a word and patiently led her back up through the passages they had come down together. They had gone past the chute and the spillway and the long straight channel, back towards the cavern where she had first fallen.

The closer they came, the louder the drilling grew, until she could feel it even through her boots, a deep, slow thud in the rock. When she pressed her palm to the wall, the stone was trembling. And now the beacon was chirping.

She held it up over her head, turning slowly in a circle, and watched the bar flicker and strengthen when she faced the north wall. She walked towards it, and then along it, and the bar grew stronger still.

“They must have dropped a relay down the borehole,” she muttered. “Or they’re running a line down with the drill string. Either way, it’s close. It’s really close.”

She found the strongest point at the base of a crack in the wall, where the rock was damp. She crouched down beside it and pressed the button on the side of the beacon, and she held her breath.

The speaker crackled loudly. There was a burst of harsh static and then silence, then another burst, and then, finally, a voice.

“…repeat, this is Survey Team Four. Beacon, please respond. Frankie? Frankie, if you can hear this, please respond.”

She knew that voice instantly. She had spent three weeks arguing with that voice.

Her throat closed up so tightly that for a moment she couldn’t speak. She pressed the button again and her hand was shaking so hard she nearly dropped the beacon.

“Ethan?” she said. “Ethan, it’s me. It’s Frankie. I’m here.”

There was a long, crackling pause. Then a sound came through the speaker that she had never heard from Ethan Mercer. A sharp, ragged breath, and then something that might have been a laugh or a sob or both at once.

“Frankie? God. God, Frankie.” His voice cracked right down the middle. “We thought… we thought you were dead.”

“I’m not,” she said, and she was crying now, tears running down her face above her mask. “I’m not dead. I’m okay.”

“Are you hurt? Are you injured? Talk to me.”

“I’m fine. I hurt my side in the fall, but it’s healing. I’m okay, Ethan. I promise.”

“Jesus.” She heard him draw in a long, shaky breath. “Jesus, Frankie. We went down after the collapse. We searched for three days. The passage was choked with rubble, and there was nothing there but wet rock. Tanjiri said it was a leaking ice seam, and that was what rotted your anchors. There was nothing else. No sign of you, no beacon ping, nothing. Tanjiri kept saying you were too stubborn to die, and I thought…” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was rough. “I’m sorry. About the bolt. About all of it. You were right. You were right, and I didn’t listen.”

She closed her eyes tightly. For three weeks, she had wanted to hear him say that. Now that he had, it didn’t seem to matter very much.